Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.
@turtle, that seems like a rather poor understanding of the role of Gold if one should choose to hold it. Ignoring trading it as a speculation for the moment, It is an alternative to holding cash in currency and as a hedge or diversification. Its us…
Unfortunately, the open source software as is usually the case is designed by techies that get carried away by "coolness" and feature creep then usability. This whole overdesigned hovering business is so 2000s in this age of touch devices. :-) But t…
@MikeM, interesting question. Depends on to what extent it "takes off".
Realistically, its role will be less than what its proponents hype it to be and more than what its detractors give it credit for.
While there is great potential for its sprea…
Impossible to pick a top but from technicals I would expect a 4-6% pullback in biotech soon that shouldn't be a concern given its rise so far. The trend and momentum is still up. But I would use a stop at around 7% below current. Any shock to the ma…
Note I said continuing storm. There were episodes you mentioned earlier in Feb that brought certain sites down and even those were managed in short amount of time. The problems here are continuing sporadically over weeks and for very short periods. …
Both @junkster and @bobc can be right. Until one sees the complete provisions, it is difficult to see if there is a catch or not. Headline numbers for annuities don't always tell the whole story.
I am skeptical of the explanation. There is no continuing internet "storm". Seems to me like they are using that as an excuse to hide over/poor provisioning of their virtual servers where a few high activity sites keep starving others out on the sam…
If you must bet against the dollar buy TBT.
Not sure why you think that. First, it is short term interest rates that affect currency and increasing rates makes the currency stronger so you wouldn't short short-term bonds to bet on declining curren…
Lots of ignorant statements are being made by a lot of people who know very little about what bitcoins were about or how they worked.
Care to enlighten?
Hardly the place to expound on the subject but as I have mentioned above reading up a bit on th…
That said, I think Bitcoin continues but I think it achieving mass acceptance is increasingly unlikely.
It will happen as soon as it starts to solve mainstream painpoints such as cheap money transfer across national borders as an example. Or avoidi…
Agree with @catch22.
It is more like deflationary fears being overcome that had depressed commodities and their subsequent mean reversion as long as those fears don't re-appear. It is a far cry from that to inflationary fears.
Interesting that you use the past tense for bitcoins in your criticism of aledged idiots.
*alleged*
Bitcoin is conflated with two things. The technology that underlies the virtual currency which is evolving and will endure. The current form of mone…
Lots of ignorant statements are being made by a lot of people who know very little about what bitcoins were about or how they worked.
How much money did you lost?
*lose*
Nothing. I don't invest in Bitcoins but know about the technology. It is th…
Ever since Bill Gross wrote against the folly of capital markets and the misallocation of capital to serve its own end than any social good which I thought at the time was a surprising piece of indictment from an insider, I have noticed several atte…
While nothing is perfect, Fidelity would be my first recommendation in breadth of NTF mutual funds, research tools and competent platform that works. Fidelity has reduced the minimum holding period for non-Fidelity funds to 60 days. Their platform w…
Charles did warn that the page is optimized to work with Chrome. Unfortunately, for now, you'll have to use Chrome to access it, or just download the .pdf version. I'm sorry for that inconvenience.
Chip, try putting a P3P compact policy header in…
I've changed the font settings, so that the discussion board will use the default sans-serif font for whatever browser you're using. Please let me know if that helps.
Thank you. Has made it much better.
It is the font family in custom.css line 2 that is causing the problem. It overrides the Lucida Grande,... in default style in style.css. The Futura font specified there does not render well and makes the fonts tinier to boot. Just removing that lin…
Looks good so far. One suggestion is to change the default specified font to something more standard so that it renders well on all browsers and devices. The current font rendered on the iPad is difficult to read for a long time. The bold characters…
Reply to @DavidV: You are missing some important distinctions in clumping everything under backtesting. It is not the back testing that is the issue as I said before but predicting future performance based on a combination of a complicated sequence …
Reply to @DavidV: For one thing, you can change your thinking to make that question moot.
There is no value to doing performance analysis for the future whether via back testing or not. What exactly do you intend to do based on that result? That is…
Mike, you have precipitated a cat fight in the forum and have made members spend a lot of time with you. Before you potentially get too much into a "helpless damsel" syndrome and the highs consequent attention brings, as I have told you earlier, you…
I think this is a good example of a fund where the underlying markets for the fund have been out of favor than the fund unraveling. It is useful to make that distinction.
The investment thesis for the fund still seems valid for the long term so far.
Tools like these are good for entertainment purposes and have helped advisors create impressive numbets and charts to convince their customers that their fee is justified but back testing for performance has very little practical value at best and c…
Funds like these cannot be judged based on a year or two. If you do, then you bought it for the wrong reason.
It is a valid question as to what the role of such a fund in a portfolio is. That is a difficult question to answer.
I wouldn't make it…
The same old indexing argument.
How many logical fallacies can you spot in the arguments of this type?
1. Most funds don't beat the index after all fees.
2. So, your fund won't beat the index.
3. Since your fund won't beat the index, it will trail…
An interesting analysis but if I read it correctly, the comparison to the category average seems to indicate not manager skill but the variance in manager skills within that category. In other words, if you are in a category with a lot of bad manage…
I use stop limits for trading leveraged ETFs in my play money portfolio as a necessity.
There is no clean mechanical solution and it doesn't always result in what you want. What you use depends a lot on how often you want to trade, whether it is a …
Reply to @MOZART325:
For long term holding, the premium at purchase is in the noise even if as high as .1%. You normally buy ETFs that have cheaper ER than the corresponding mutual fund. The effect of the difference in ER year after year for the sam…
Reply to @finder: Profit taking from its runup and rotation of momentum trades into materials and international. From a TA perspective, it should retrace back to about 205 support if just profit taking and to about 195 support if there is a signific…
Good article with a caveat and a bad title as always from Chuck. The caveat is that stocks have a higher return is not some natural law but an assumption based on historical empirical evidence. A long stretch of heads in a coin tossing experiment ha…
A week is too short to detect a trend but I do sense the beginning of a rotation from relatively recession-resistant assets (health care, tech, etc) into global economic growth exploiting sectors (commodities, inflation hedges, emerging markets, etc…
Reply to @MOZART325: Several problematic assumptions here.
Very few retail advisors deploy $10M at a time into the same fund. Institutional funds already use indexed ETFs for large in and out flows without suffering from these spreads. Some are don…
Reply to @hank: Good points.
However, a large number of similar funds CAN be a symptom of poor portfolio construction or an ad hoc kitchen sink strategy (i.e. fundaholic strategy). This might imply a poor overall portfolio allocation and in the wo…
